General disarray: Russia’s military failures

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. Today from London, I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. A Turkish activist has been handed a life sentence for crimes including providing pastries to protesters nearly a decade ago. It's a case that reveals Turkey's broken judiciary and President Erdogan's repressive plans as a tough election approaches. And 100 years ago today, Toots Tielemans was born. He played harmonica with Miles Davis and Charlie Parker. His music is in decades worth of films and advertisements. But most familiar, perhaps, is the work he did on Sesame Street. First up, though, Russian missiles struck Kyiv yesterday while United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres was visiting for talks with Ukraine's President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

The Security Council failed to do everything in its power to prevent and end this war, and this is a source of great disappointment, frustration and anger.

Officials in the Kremlin are likely to be feeling a sense of disappointment and frustration, too. Pentagon officials said yesterday that the Russian push, now concentrated in the eastern region of Donbas, was making slow and uneven progress. In two months, Russian forces have succeeded in capturing just one big city, Kherson, along with the ruins of Mariupol and chunks of Donbas. Meanwhile, British estimates suggest 15,000 Russian soldiers have been killed, more than were lost over a decade of the Soviet Union's war in Afghanistan. The invasion has clearly been a fiasco for Russia. But why?

A few months ago, we took stock of Russia's armed forces before the invasion of Ukraine, and I suggested that they were a lean, modernized force. And that was the mainstream assumption. On the eve of war, Russia's invasion force was seen as pretty formidable. American intelligence agencies thought that Kyiv would fall in days. Some European officials thought it would last for weeks. But pretty much no one thought that European prime ministers and presidents would be coming through Kyiv at the end of April.

Shashank Joshi is the Economist's defense editor.

What's actually happened has defied expectations. Russian forces have looked incompetent, they've looked unprepared. Basically a very far cry from the sort of modern military powerhouse that was advertised in Kremlin propaganda.

So what was that miscalculation based on? How did we get to making that mistake?

Russia fought a war with Georgia in 2008. Now, Georgia's a pretty small country, but the Russians basically botched it. They fielded completely obsolete equipment, they botched their command and control. This was kind of like the last gasp of a Soviet army. And in response to that, the Russian leadership slashed the size of the army, saying, we're going to develop a smaller but much more effective, much more professional military force. The military budget doubled between 2005 and 2018, and they built hundreds of planes, hundreds of helicopters, thousands of drones. And they also tested a lot of that stuff in wars in eastern Ukraine, which they first invaded in 2014, and in Syria, where they intervened in 2015. That reform process was thought to have led to a brand new Russian military.

That's a great deal of money spent. But it's not very clear the Russian military got much for its money in the end.

No, and I think the sort of three explanations that are being debated, one of them is that, look, this isn't really the army's fault. They had a political leadership led by Vladimir Putin that wanted to invade Ukraine and thought the whole thing was a house of cards that would collapse. And so they didn't feel they would actually need to fight a war. They just thought they'd send in special forces and paratroopers and that would be it. Then. The second explanation is that the army itself, once that initial effort failed, made some pretty bad strategic and tactical choices. They invaded Ukraine from four or five different angles, splitting up their force. They didn't have tanks and infantry and artillery and air power fighting in harmony. And those two things, bad politics and bad strategic choices by the military, are things that perhaps you could change. Right, if you were fighting a different war, the Russian army could do that differently. But the third explanation suggests that there's more of a structural problem with the Russian armed forces, which is to say things like corruption has affected their campaign. Russian vehicles in some cases had cheap Chinese tyres that made them more likely to get stuck in the mud and. And more likely to get towed away by gleeful Ukrainian farmers. It may also explain why so many Russian units ended up using DODGY radios and they had to rely on Ukrainian mobile phone networks, which got them intercepted and got them killed. That suggests it isn't just something the Russian army could do differently next time or can change on a dime, but it suggests there's kind of a deeper rot that they have to address.

There had been a suggestion before the war that corruption was rife also in Ukraine. Is that not a structural problem perhaps also for Ukraine?

It absolutely is. And that's why things like corruption can't be the whole story. Ukraine's a pretty corrupt country. It's not that much less corrupt than Russia. But I think what this tells us is just how important the human factor is in warfare. The Ukrainians are fighting for national survival, for the existence of their state. What are the Russian ones fighting for? Many Russian soldiers didn't even know they were going to war until they were sent over the border. Now that is not good for morale. I was told by a European intelligence official that in many units conscripts have refused to serve and they have refused to sign contracts that would turn them into professional soldiers. And that's happened even in some pretty elite units. And if you have teenagers from Siberia or Vladivostok who have been press ganged into service, who were being fed expired rations, equipped with badly maintained vehicles and being thrown into Ukraine without really knowing why they are there, being told that they're hunting Nazis, is that a force that's going to be able to pull off the complex manoeuvres of modern warfare? Clearly not. That suggests the Russian army has a bigger problem in Ukraine with motivation, with morale and the quality of the troops that it is putting in the field. Whereas the Ukrainians, well, they're fighting for a cause. They're fighting for something that really motivates men and women to fight.

So the suggestion here is that the Russian military has perhaps a range of problems, tactical, systemic and so on. Are they adapting to those problems, making adjustments as they continue in their campaign in Ukraine?

This is the key question we're all watching this offensive in Donbas in eastern Ukraine to see if they adapt to. Because all armies make mistakes, right? The distinguishing feature of good ones from bad ones is whether they learn from their mistakes and how quickly they do so to some extent, they have learned. They have abandoned Kyiv, they've focused on one part of the country. They're putting a single general in charge of the whole thing. All of that is a kind of learning process. But look, when I asked a Western official about this a couple of weeks ago, he said to me, they are still sending in armored columns along single track roads without infantry support, which is suicidal. And I spoke to another official this week and he said the Russians are still struggling to advance in heavy rain. So there's some kind of worrying signs here, if you were the Russian general staff, that your ability to adapt in the campaign itself is quite limited. It's difficult to fix structural problems. Right? You can't fix corruption, you can't fix tactical ineptitude, a lack of training, unmotivated conscript while you are still in the war itself.

But regardless, it would seem clear that the misapprehension from a few months ago that Russia's army is ready and modernized, that's all gone. Now. What does that mean to you?

There's a debate raging among Western officials, Western militaries, over how to interpret all of this. And there's one camp that says it's just too early to tell. We have to wait and see how they do in Donbas. We have to wait and see how they adapt, that they could still win this. There's another group of people that says, really, we've seen enough. This is an army that has proved utterly incapable of really complex, high end warfare. A Potemkin army. And if it attempted to attack a NATO state, it would get completely chewed up and defeated. That debate is going to rage over the coming weeks. But what I think it's safe to say is that the reputation of the Russian army is going to come out of this campaign considerably battered.

Shashank, thank you very much for joining us.

Thanks very much, Jason.

In 2013, rioting spread like wildfire across Turkey. What sparked the unrest was a protest in Gezi park, one of the last green spots in central Istanbul. Because it was set for redevelopment, people were tired of big, expensive and seemingly unnecessary construction projects. The police response to the Gezi park occupiers was swift and violent. The protesters hung on and news spread of the crackdown. Allied protests were seen all over Turkey for several weeks, revealing discontent far beyond just infrastructure projects. And those too faced police crackdowns. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan immediately began a hunt for provocateurs. The rioters, but also doctors who tended those wounded in the crackdowns, the lawyers who defended them. Even now, being associated with Gezi park is a serious charge, especially if you're a thorn in Mr. Erdogan's side.

Osman Kavala is one of Turkey's most respected civil society activists. On April 25, he was handed a life sentence for attempting to overthrow the country's government during protests almost a decade ago.

Piotr Zalewski is our Turkey correspondent.

He's not the only person to be sentenced in this trial. Seven other defendants who took part in the protests, among them a filmmaker, a lawyer, an urban planner and an architect, were sentenced to 18 years in prison. And even by the standards of Turkey's broken judiciary, this trial has been a farce. The charges against Mr. Kavala and his co defendants were not only entirely unsubstantiated, but also involved a willful blurring of peaceful protest with armed insurrection and a coup attempt.

How do you mean, though? How did we get here?

Mr. Kavala was a patron of the arts, a businessman, a philanthropist, and one of the champions of a reconciliation between Turks and Armenians. He has campaigned in the past for.

Recognition of the Armenian genocide.

He was arrested in late 2017. He was then tried on charges related to the Gezi park protests which engulfed Turkey in 2013, and he was acquitted in 2020. But he was also arrested just hours later on separate charges, also unsubstantiated, related to a coup attempt against Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. An appeals court then overturned the acquittals in the Gezi park case, which led to the retrial, which has just concluded. Basically, Kavala was arrested on one set of charges, acquitted re arrested on separate charges, convicted on charges of which he had been acquitted in the first place. When the European Court of Human Rights ordered Mr. Kavala's release, Turkey's government refused. And when the American ambassador to Turkey and nine of his European colleagues asked Turkey to abide by the ECHR ruling, Mr. Erdogan nearly had them expelled, saying their statements were an insult to Turkey's judges and prosecutors. And that the Turkish judiciary was free from interference.

So how did the defendants respond to these sentences being handed down?

Well, Mr. Kavila was not present at the trial some time ago. He decided that he would not attend in person. And in his closing statement, speaking by video link, he called the case a judicial assassination. Moments after the verdict was delivered, two of his co defendants, Can Atalay, a lawyer, and Mujela Yapji, an architect, stood inside the courtroom in front of a crowd of shocked onlookers, some of them wiping away tears. Mr. Attalay shouted, they will now take us to Silivri, but we know that we will not bow to tyranny. He was referring to an infamous prison outside Istanbul.

So the implication here is that Mr. Erdogan has had a hand in this? Why should he? Why not leave it to the courts?

Well, in cases like this one, cases that are politically charged, the Turkish judiciary tends to do the government's bidding. And Mr. Erdogan is personally believed to have been pulling the strings in the case. He had once accused Mr. Kavala of being an agent of the billionaire investor George Soros, or as Mr. Erdogan called him, the famous Hungarian Jew. And in fact, a few days after the verdict was handed down, Mr. Erdogan referred to Kavala as the Turkish Soros. And prosecutors also said that Mr. Kavalla and other defendants had instigated and bankrolled those 2013 anti government protests. The most damning evidence they found were wiretapped phone calls, which documented Mr. Kavala's plans to provide protesters with a plastic table and some pastries. So that should give you an idea of the kind of evidence that had been used in the case to incriminate Mr. Kavala and his co defendants.

So that flimsy evidence, this what you call a farcical trial, what effect will that have on relations between Turkey and the West?

Well, those relations are already strained because.

Of the Kavala case. And the verdict will surely damage relations.

Further, America's response.

A statement urging Turkey to release Mr. Kavala, a statement that called his conviction unjust and an example of judicial harassment.

Of civil society, was even more harshly.

Phrased than the one that almost got its ambassador kicked out. And EU officials have also roundly condemned the decision.

And will Mr. Erdogan care about all that condemnation?

Mr. Erdogan might care somewhat.

But he cares less about the international outcry than he does about the impact of this decision. Domestically, Mr. Erdogan is facing a crucial election next year, both presidential and parliamentary. And by ensuring a guilty verdict and such, a long sentence for the Gezi park defendants and a life sentence for Mr. Kavala, he has made it clear that dissent in Turkey risks being equated with treason that might paralyze Turkish civil society in the run up to the 2023 elections. Mr. Erdogan trails his rivals in the polls, largely as a result of his disastrous economic policies, which have brought the inflation rate to 60%.

But it seems that instead of fighting.

Inflation, he now plans to step up repression.

Piotr, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

It's one of the most recognizable songs from a children's series ever made.

Sebastian Scotney writes about music for the Economist.

You've got a chorus of children and Then there's the sound of an instrument that comes over it. And that sound is there for the closing credits of Sesame street as well. And the sound is a harmonica comes from one man whose centenary falls today, 29th April, Toots Tielemans. He really did make the harmonica into an instrument that people wanted to hear. He was born in Brussels in a working class district called Marolle. His first instrument was the guitar. He also developed a technique where he whistled along with the guitar. His most famous piece, which has become one of the great jazz standards, is Bluzette. He fell in love with jazz during the German occupation. He then emigrated to the US and took US citizenship. And the story in the US is that he more or less played with everybody. The remarkable thing is that he didn't just play with the bebop heroes, he played with Charlie Parker, he played with Miles Davis, but he was also keeping current all the way through. And there's this album called Affinity and there's a wonderful track from that, which is towards the faster end of what happens, which is called Snow Peas. I mean, it's that unmistakable voice of Toots harmonica with Bill Evans at the piano. It's an unlikely juxtaposition, but it just absolutely works. The film work is vast. Probably the most famous example is Midnight Cowboy from 1969, the John Schlesinger film. Just a haunting melody. Once you've heard it, it stays in your mind. It's another context in which people have heard this great, great sound. But that's just one of so many. It also got used in films in French like Jean de Florette and Manon de Source.

Yeah, Mufis.

And from there it gets used in commercials like a Stella Artois advert. And so he's just cropping up in so many contexts. What Toots did was to place this instrument in front of people and to make it a sound that people knew they wanted to hear. When he came back to Belgium and when he was given his Belgian citizenship back, and when he was made into a baron, he really took this business of looking after the younger musicians of Belgium incredibly seriously. And you have people like the great guitarist Philip Catherine, who just says that Toots used to just ring him up and he'd have his harmonica there and then he'd kind of play to him and he'd talk about music and he'd do the same thing with a piano player called Jeff Nev. He was just interested in being a godfather to the scene to basically help it to prosper, to help these musicians to find their way. There's a lovely quote which the pianist Jeff Nev gave in a tribute that he wrote when Toots died. And he said he was never self important. Some artists on stage just wanted to be the shining star. He made others shine. More or less. Wherever Toots played concerts with his groups in Europe, there was an expectation there that he would play Bluzette and it would get applauded. The moment he started it, he knew exactly what people wanted from him and he would give the audience what they wanted in a spirit of generosity, in a spirit of good humor, in a spirit of friendliness. As a Belgian and as a jazz musician, I think he brought out the best characteristics of both.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. The show's editors this week are Marguerite Howell and Chris Impey and our sound engineer is Will Rowe. Our senior producers are Sam Westrin, Jack Gill and John Jo Devlin. Our producers are William Warren, Rory Galloway and Alize Jean Battle Baptiste and assistant producer Evasoye Ocean Dairo. With extra production help this week from Kevin Kaners and sound engineering by Gareth Young. We'll all see you back here on Monday.